Extract: The Shooting Gallery
By Gaz Hunter
Extract from a book by a former SAS soldier who fought with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan during the 1980s Soviet war there. The torture scene described is unpleasant. (The Mujahideen in the extract were given nicknames from The Lord of the Rings by the author.)
The Mujahideen regrouped, falling back up the slope towards me. Aragorn pointed to the last truck and Frodo and Smeagol fired their rockets together. It went up, in a huge, blinding explosion. A sheet of orange flame raced right along the length of the convoy, billowing up through the air to where I was crouched.
It was over.
After the exhilaration of the attack, something like collective panic set in. The Mujahideen were realizing what I had been feeling for some time, that we’d been on the scene much too long. The Hinds. We charged, running as hard as we could across that flat open rock pan. The four Mujahideen with the prisoners jabbed at them with their rifle-butts, forcing them to run with us. As we pelted towards the LUP I shot a glance at them. They were white Russians, little more than boys of eighteen or nineteen. To my eyes, they didn’t have the look of fighting soldiers, more like clerks or storekeepers, or just possibly mechanics, strictly rear-echelon types. They were baby-faced, spotty youths. They were wearing well-worn drab-grey overalls, no regimental flashes or badges, not even name-tapes, which for Russians was highly unusual. This told me they were conscripts, from a second-rate unit, nothing special.
One was quite tall, about six foot, with a single lance-corporal’s insignia. The other man, shorter and broader, was a private. They both had head-lice haircuts, shaved down to the bone.
They were terrified.
The private was badly burned: large clumps of his hair were crisped to the scalp, the skin on his face and forearms was blistered and bright red where it wasn’t black with soot. In places, his clothing had caught fire. He was also bleeding from at least one shrapnel or bullet wound – a big dark-red patch stained the top of his camouflage trousers. The other was relatively unscathed, with just the odd cut or bruise, nothing serious. I knew that if this pair were really lucky, the Mujahideen would keep them, unharmed, to trade for important prisoners of their own. Otherwise, depending on how much time they had, they would either kill these boys outright – or torture them to death.
These Russians weren’t lucky.
The burned one was in bad shape: he could hardly stand, let alone run, he had a man on either side of him dragging him along. The taller one kept trying to hang back, but they clubbed him forward with the AK-47s. I could see what he was thinking, in his desperate state – get to the rear of the group and then leg it as hard as he could in the other direction, hope the Mujahideen wouldn’t follow him, but they made sure they kept him penned in. We kept running. We had to get back across that kilometre and more of open ground to the rock channel and cover. If the Hinds caught us out in the open like this, we were dead meat. I saw the others glancing back fearfully over their shoulders as we ran. All of us were wide-eyed, we were all expecting the worst. As we sprinted for the rocks, I found myself gasping for breath. I was completely dehydrated: the dust and the gunsmoke, the contact, and now this panic run in the heat for the ridge – all without water. We had it with us, but we didn’t have time to stop and drink it. Stopping now was out of the question. That kilometre or so felt like a hundred.
I reached the cutting first with Aragorn and Frodo, who could move his little legs when he needed to. Aragorn climbed up along the spur for some way, looping us back round on to our tracks, then stopped and watched back from the high ground for any sign of pursuit. When there was none, we slipped down into our strange series of deep natural undercuts, almost like pipes, at the base of the cliff face. So far no triple-fuck. Here, for the first time since the attack, I felt reasonably safe.
Unlike the Russians.
Once we’d got our breath back in this LUP, and made sure there were still no signs of pursuit, we set out at a good clip for base camp. After a couple more hours of travelling, we stopped. The Mujahideen whacked the prisoners to the ground, got round them, and started: kicking, laying into them with their rifle-butts, a long, continuous, intense beating. They weren’t trying to get any information – they had no language in common with these boys – they just wanted to make them suffer. They succeeded.
I had known from the start they were going to torture these two boys to death.
Except for the odd grunt of pain when a really heavy blow landed the Russians made no sound. The four men who had made the capture did most of the work. Smeagol was orchestrating the beating, his narrow face pinched to a furious point as he took out his hatred on the squirming men. They concentrated mainly on the badly-injured private. In his case, they didn’t have much time – he was slipping into shock, his eyes taking on the dead, glazed-over look I’d seen in the past, on another young boy’s face when he was dying.
The other prisoner was much more aware of what was going on only too aware. They forced him to kneel on the ground and watch as they beat his mate. For a short time he stayed there. But then, when he thought they were all busy, he half stood, stumbling off to a clumsy attempt to get away.
It was a terrible mistake. At once they were on him in a pack, beating him as hard as they could with their feet and the rifle-butts. He fell on his back, curling up like a baby to protect himself, wrapping his arms tight around his head under the rain of blows. I knew how he felt.
In a while they stopped, staring down at him. They started talking at top speed, discussing the boy, but so fast that I couldn’t follow their meaning. There was no need for any translation. They meant to do something worse. Four of them got round him, pulling his arms and legs apart until he was stretched straight out. Two more sat down on his shoulders and kidneys. A third man sat on his backside, pulled the Russian’s right leg up between his own, and held it so that the foot stuck straight up. Smeagol came forward. There was a flash as a knife came into his hand. With swift, slashing strokes, he sliced away the Russian’s boot, the blade cutting deep into the flesh of the foot. The boy was kicking and thrashing, trying to look round, he knew something bad was coming. The Mujahideen held him still.
When the foot was exposed the man holding it grabbed the prisoner’s toes, pulling back as hard as he could on them, at the same time forcing the heel up and out. Smeagol stepped forward. He brought up the knife, rammed its point through the ankle behind the Achilles tendon, hooked back on the blade, and twisted it. The tendon snapped like a piano wire, the white strings of it flopping apart where it was cut. The Russian let out a scream, a terrible high-pitched howling that went on and on, the sound I had heard when Chris had the paling go in through his thigh, the sound the pigs made up on Dindor Hill when the farmers slaughtered them, only this scream was a thousand times worse.
To stop him making that terrible noise, they hammered him in the face with their rifle-butts, slamming away until he fell silent.
I had frozen. I was trying not to look, and at the same time I was transfixed by the horror of what was happening not five metres in front of me. The Russian’s foot was hanging off. The Mujahideen themselves were quiet, intent on what they were doing. Aragorn shouted something. The four men who had done the disabling walked across to the other, badly burned, Russian. The rest of the group had propped him up with his back against a rock. He was now fully in shock: his expression told me he didn’t know much about what was going on.
Lucky for him.
They got hold of him and pulled him upright, splaying him backwards across the boulder so that his stomach was fully exposed. Another man came forward with his knife and cut away the prisoner’s clothing. I could see a bad shrapnel or bullet wound in the skin beneath his right ribs, still oozing blood. Two of the other Mujahideen stepped across to the man with the severed tendon. He was bone-white and shaking uncontrollably, curled up, staring at his useless foot in disbelief. They yanked him up by the hair, forcing his head back and holding it so that he had no choice but to watch what would happen next. When he was sure that the lance-corporal was paying attention, the Mujahideen man plunged the point of his dagger deep into the private’s side, dragging the blade across and down with both hands. A huge cut opened up. The conscript’s stomach bag slit apart and all his entrails fell out. The smell hit me and I gagged. The watching Russian retched, once, and then began to scream again. In another second, the pain of his disembowelling hit the man on the rock, and he, too, started to scream.
You can never forget a sound like that.
I could stand no more, I had to move, get out of there. I started to turn. But a flashing movement in the corner of my eye made me glance back. The Mujahideen was sawing at the throat of the man he had just disembowelled. Almost immediately, another fighter put a pistol to the Russian’s head and fired a single shot. I couldn’t understand this, there was a risk that the Russians might hear, if any were in pursuit, and they would exact a terrible revenge. I wondered what was the point of killing the boy like that. What lesson were they hoping to teach the other?
They left the dead man opened up on the rock.
We started moving again, making ground until we were just outside our base village. I was keeping well back, I didn’t want to see or hear more. Most of all, I didn’t want to make eye-contact again with the remaining Russian. Every time he looked up he tried to catch my gaze. In spite of my clothing he had spotted me as another European: to his mind, I was his only chance. But I couldn’t help him. There was no way in the world I could stop what was going on. To this day I can’t forget the way he looked at me – that desperate, dumb appeal.
Always, when they were on the move, the Mujahideen would stop, from time to time, to listen out for aircraft. Their cars were the only early-warning system they had. When we stopped they dropped the Russian in the dust, listened for a minute, then stood around him, muttering. I could tell they were fed up with having to pull him along. I hoped they were going to make an end of it. As Smeagol came up with the knife, I could feel myself shrinking inside, my own guts curling up at the sight of that blade and that murderous face. God only knew what horror the boy was feeling.
As he saw Smeagol coming, he tried to wriggle back, but they caught him, this time holding him fast around the head and neck. Smeagol stood in front of him, waving the knife in his face, taunting him. He looked like a snake about to strike. Suddenly, he lunged forward, sticking the knife point repeatedly into the skin all around the prisoner’s eyes. Deep gashes appeared in the skin of his forehead, and cheeks. Then Smeagol moved the knife down to the arms and chest, drawing the edge of the blade slowly through the flesh so that the blood welled up out of the cuts. I turned away for the second time, standing with my back to them and pretending not to care. I tried to talk to Bilbo, fiddling with my AK-47, but for some reason the words wouldn’t come. Then I heard another scream, the same ear-splitting scream he’d made when they’d severed his ankle, and I saw they’d cut the other one in the same way.
But still it wasn’t enough for them. They got on top of him, pinning him again so that he was utterly unable to move. Pushing the eyelids apart with his finger and thumb, Smeagol stuck the point of his knife into the Russian’s left eye. With a flick of his wrist he hooked out the eyeball, then stood back, leaving it hanging from its stalk. He was about to do the same to the other eye when Aragorn laid a hand on his arm. They had another short chat. Our commander wanted the Russian’s remaining eye left intact, not out of mercy, or because enough was enough, but so that he’d see and understand exactly what they were going to do to him next.
I couldn’t imagine what there was left they could do. And I didn’t want to. I thought – hoped – they’d finish him now. I went down into the camp, and sat on my own, staring up at the clean beauty of the mountains, with my mind full of another man’s screams.
Later, unasked, Bilbo came up and told me what they had done to the Russian. They had wanted the wild animals to get him so they had dragged him a good bit further up the mountain away from the camp, to a flat spot near a low rock where they’d smashed all his fingers with their rifle-butts. After that, they’d slashed open his stomach, the cut just wide and deep enough to start his stomach contents bulging, so that he’d reek of his own blood and guts but live on for another six to twelve hours. Then, to stop him screaming, they had cut out his tongue. I hoped he had choked on his own blood – at least that was quicker. They’d left him like that, face down on the rock, with his eyeball hanging down and his insides coming out, for the rats, the wild dogs and the mountain foxes, balanced carefully so that he could see them coming for him.
And that’s how he died.
In the camp, meanwhile, I could see that the Mujahideen were well pleased about the contact at the bridge: they had suffered no serious casualties, picked up some useful weaponry and supplies, and destroyed an APC and several supply trucks. But the great thing was they had killed at least seven white Russians. They kept going over the details of the attack, telling and retelling it, exactly as I had done after contacts many times before with mates in the Regiment. As well as celebrating victory, it’s a way of dealing with stress, fear, and with the excess adrenaline that’s still pumping through you long after the contact’s over.
As for the men they had tortured to death, Bilbo tried to explain to me that it meant nothing to the Mujahideen, it was part of the furniture of war. It was true that while they were at it, there had been no screams of enjoyment, no jeering or laughing. They hadn’t done it for the sadistic pleasure of watching two men suffer. But for me, that was one of the worst things: the cold-blooded, measured, deliberate way they had gone about it. I had trained the Mujahideen in the desert so I had had some idea before I went into Afghanistan of what they were like. I had heard their stories about flaying alive Russian prisoners. But when it happened I wasn’t prepared for it. To understand something like that, you had to be a part of their culture.
They had their own logic for treating their Russian prisoners in that way. They hated the Russians for killing their women and children in the relentless air attacks. And it set an example to their own men, dissuading them from going over to the Afghan government forces. But, mainly, they did it out of hatred, for revenge, and to break the enemy’s morale. They wanted the Russians out of their country. They would do anything to achieve that. Fear was their most potent weapon, and the Mujahideen had to make the Russians pay too high a cost.
Linked from Star Warrior story chapter: “Terms”